


That Kind of Boyfriend

by admiralindia



Series: Red Collegiate [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Emergency room, M/M, Roommates, brief mentions of sex, eventual hurt/comfort, tw for bodily harm/blood/glass-related puncture wounds, tw for sutures, tw for totally kosher medical usage of needles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2017-12-29 14:50:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/admiralindia/pseuds/admiralindia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sollux.” You glance over at the parents with their son and try to make your voice do what theirs are doing instead of what yours is doing, which is messing everything up. They make soothing look so simple, like it’s a natural human gift that comes with the operating system. Meanwhile, your inner caretaker lies comatose at the bottom of an oubliette. “You’re psyching yourself, dude. Stuff like this hurts more when you look at it. Just breathe.” Wow, you almost can’t handle how moronic you sound. You have no choice but to get up and physically walk away from yourself.</p><p>[Or: Sollux steps on a beer bottle and then things get really complicated.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Anonymous over on [Tumblr](http://admiralindia.tumblr.com/). The prompt was, "I don't know if you are still taking writing prompts. But if you are, do you do Hurt/Comfort scenarios? Because I was thinking another college student story where Dave has to take Sollux in to the hospital or Sollux gets into an accident, and either way ends up in ICU."

Sollux is a damn good representative of your generation, sometimes (often) to crazy extremes. You think this is why he never calls you on the telephone. Even though it takes longer for you to reply by text, even though sometimes you reply to him too late for whatever he says to be relevant, he avoids throwing his voice into space. He can’t explain this aversion, only that “phoneth are weird.” Rose says it’s because texting is newer, that for someone like Sollux, who surges forward on the very tip of technological progress, outdated tech is psychologically disturbing.

You kind of think he just doesn’t like the way his voice sounds over the phone, but whatever. Your sister is the brain wizard, not you. As a consequence of Sollux’s “generationally advanced phone thing bullshit,” you don’t have his photograph in your cell’s address book. You have photographs of everyone else you know, even people you’ve done assignments with and then forgotten about as quickly as possible. So when your screen lights up to announce an incoming call, you almost ignore it thinking it’s a wrong number.

“Yo.” Nothing to see here. Just Sollux using his vocal chords on a microphone.

There’s an uncertain pause on the other end like the poor bastard doesn’t know how to handle his newfound backwards compatibility. “Dave?”

“No, this is the other person who answers Dave’s personal cell, but I could relay a message to Dave.”

“Yeth pleathe. Tell Dave that Tholluxth called and wanth him to know that he’th a giant douthecanoe. Altho that Solluxth needth Dave to come pick him up.”

The world outside your window is an ugly, grey-streaked mess. The parking lot has become a shallow lake dotted with several dozen painted aluminum islands. “I’m just looking out of my window and thinking to myself, ‘Gosh, how would this situation be different if Sollux Captor burned the extra half-calorie that was necessary for grabbing the umbrella that lives right by our front door?’”

“I’ll need that extra half-calorie to shove my middle finger in your thtupid fathe when you get here.”

“Put that half-calorie in the bank ‘cause you ain’t spending it now.”

“There’th glath in my foot.”

“Huh. That’s a funny coincidence because there’s also glass in my hands and I suddenly can’t use the steering wheel whoopsie impasse.”

“Really, though.”

You take a moment to blink doubtfully at the insides of your shades. That finished, you are ready to entertain the vague possibility that Sollux isn’t lying to you. “Really.”

“Legitimately.”

“There’s actually glass in your foot.”

“ _Yeth!_ ”

“How the hell did that even happen? This isn’t the third world people wear shoes here when they go outside.”

“My thoeth were thlippery! I almotht fell tho I took them off, then I wath walking in the gutter becauthe wet grath ith dithguthting and that’th where I thtepped on the glath.”

Somewhere towards the end of this exchange, you start believing him. Sollux isn’t capable of imagining that kind of stupidity. Only enacting it, apparently. “Okay, I’m coming. How bad is it?”

“What do you mean how bad ith it? Ith about ath bad ath having glath in the thole of my foot, probably. Wherever that fallth on the thcale.”

You’re having trouble gauging the severity of his injury because Sollux sounds so chill about it, like yeah no problem I’ve got some glass in my foot it’s very inconvenient but could you come pick me up? Either the injury will be very small and you can put him back together again over the bathroom sink or it’s very large and he’s calm about it because he’s going into some kind of medical shock. Is that a symptom of medical shock? You have no idea. On your way out, you fish a bottle of Bacardi from the back of your snack cabinet.

“Yeah, but is it a big shard, a little shard, several shards?” You tuck the alcohol under your arm and the phone between your shoulder and ear so you can lock the door behind you. Down the hall, one of your neighbors is going into his apartment as you’re coming out of yours and he eyes you like parents eye registered sex offenders. You know for a fact he doesn’t have kids, but he looks like he wants to hide them from you anyway. You guess because you’re that guy with the troll boyfriend. Yours is not a notably progressive city. “Give me a rough estimate of how much carnage I should expect. Is your foot torn open? Can you see muscle or bone or anything?”

“Oh thit thtop! I haven’t looked.”

Your neighbor slides quickly into his apartment and you flip him off because you know he’s probably watching you through his peephole.

“You haven’t looked at all? Like you could be bleeding out from the bottom of your foot without even knowing it?”

“I don’t have hemophilia, Dave. But you thould thtill hurry,” he adds after a minute.

“I’m coming,” you assure him again. You’re already taking the stairs faster than is safely possible, jumping the last four or five steps at each landing. You burst dramatically into weak sunlight. “Hold.”

You stick your phone up your sleeve and do the rain-dash across the parking lot. From an upstairs window, it probably looks like you’re running on water. The car door is unlocked when you get there, so all you have to do is grab the oh shit handle on the inside and swing yourself in. “You still there?”

“Yeth.”

“Where am I going?”

“Jutht drive towards the new chem labs. I’m thitting on a curb between the apartment and there.”

Something in his voice suggests that he’s about to hang up, so you tell him to stay on the line. “You never know,” is your reasoning. That sentence is better left hanging.

“My phone is getting wet, though,” Sollux protests weakly. It’s good to see his phone aversion reasserting itself, but it needs to hold off for a few more minutes.

“Your case is waterproof so it’s fine.” In the silence that follows, you can tell he’s weighing the pros and cons of hanging up on you anyway. “Don’t do it. I’ll pull over right here and send an ambulance after you.” 

He curses at you for a solid minute, which is nice while it lasts because when he’s bitching he isn’t hanging up on you or going into shock or exsanguinating all over the road. When he finally runs out of vocabulary words and lapses into moody silence, you start getting antsy and asking him every couple of minutes if he’s still breathing. He says, “Fuck you athfathe,” each time so you think he’s doing good.

He’s located about where you expect him to be, sitting kind of sideways on the curb. He’s curled over one of his knees so the rain isn’t falling on his face, shielding his schoolbag with his body. The blue fabric is so dark with water that it looks almost black. You take one look at it and hope to god his laptop isn’t in there. Or that he makes frequent backups. His other leg—the one with the glass in it, if you guess—is stretched out along the length of the curb. At least he’s mostly vertical, you reason, pushing a button to activate the emergency blinkers and pulling over. You’re not supposed to stop here because there’s technically no shoulder and The War Horse is taking up half of the right lane, but that’s what the left lane is for so everyone can deal with it for a couple of minutes. Concessions must be made for dumbass injured people who are stranded in gutters. 

“Look as pathetic as possible for a few minutes because I’m illegally parked,” you call to him, hugging the edge of the car as you come around so you don’t get struck down by a passing douchebag. “Basically just keep doing what you’re already doing.”

His head doesn’t come up, but he’s feeling lively enough to present his middle finger for your viewing pleasure, so you relax a little. 

The gutter is trying its absolute damnedest to imitate a scaled-down river, complete with its own little whitewater areas. Sollux’s pant legs are rolled up—something he probably did when he first took off his shoes—and the current eddies around Sollux’s good foot, almost ankle-high. There could definitely be a minefield of broken glass hidden under there and you would never know it until the pain started. You kneel carefully by curb and lean your head over so you can get a good look at the damage without moving it around. 

The bleeding isn’t too bad. A thin stream of yellow drips over the edge of the curb, but the gutter isn’t running Jaws-movie red (except yellow) so that at least is an improvement on your expectations. The bottom of Sollux’s foot looks like a piece of modern art—something titled “hedgehog” and smashed together by an artist who sincerely believes that reference photos are for suckers and that magic mushrooms are magical enough to make his Frankensteinian creations into art. One or two tiny fragments jut from the ball of his foot, but most of the action is concentrated around the middle—that tender soft part that’s probably soft even on trolls. Bizarrely, you realize that you don’t _know_ if that part of his body is soft because you’ve never touched him there. You thought you had him fairly well mapped, but the bottom of his feet are a complete mystery to you. You feel weirdly guilty about that. 

Sollux doesn’t look like he feels it to the degree that he should be. Endorphins probably have something to do with that, but you aren’t a medical practitioner so hell if you know. This probably completely normal pain reaction is bothering you and you aren’t accustomed to being bothered. You don’t like it. 

“Ith it that bad?” 

You look up and find Sollux watching you over the top of his knee, his head angled down against the rain. Why he bothers at this point, you don’t know. He already looks like someone dredged him up from the bottom of a lake. His hair is flattened to his head, shedding water down his forehead. You shrug, grin. 

“We’ll probably have to saw it off.” 

Sollux rolls his eyes. You can tell because his head moves a certain way when he does it. “That’th thtupid. My foot will be fine.” Though the sentence ends as more of a question than a statement. 

“It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Sollux can tell you’re hedging, but you can’t give him anymore. Your bedside manner is practically nonexistent. Little comforting lies don’t come out of you the right way. In your head they sound fine, but somewhere between your throat and your tongue they become thin and two-dimensional. The only thing you’ve ever been good at is sounding casual. Feeling like you’re dangerously close to being exposed as the worst boyfriend, you stand and offer your hands. “Come on, let’s get you into the car before you grow gills and start wearing douche scarves.” 

He takes your hands, not quite looking you in the shades, and the two of you haul him from the curb. His body is not quite endothermic, but not quite exothermic either. It falls on an alien median between the two. In the winter he sleeps longer and moves slower, but he doesn’t go half-comatose like a lizard or a snake. He has three space heaters in his room that run full-tilt from November to March on a rotation cycle—two on, one off. There’s a fourth in the bathroom that he flips on when he goes to shower. He tells you that it’s not a personal quirk, that space heater companies really do get most of their business from trolls. 

Right now, in the rain, he makes a cool stripe down your side. Any human that cold would be shivering, you think, or dead, but he’s been colder. A couple of times last winter, when he thought he could get away with it, he ignored your horrified protests and climbed under blankets with you, still wearing most of his winter clothes—everything but the heavy outer coat—and cackled sadistically as you tried to fight your way free. It was like having several bags of ice poured over you.

You swoop to rescue Sollux’s schoolbag from the gutter before Sollux tips over while the troll stands there wobbling unsteadily on his one good leg like a grey, pissed off flamingo. The War Horse is close, but pavement with loose debris all over it is a bitch to navigate barefoot even when you have enough available feet to do so carefully. Deeming Sollux’s remaining foot more important than his dignity, you bend down and fold him at the knee, collapsing him into your arms like a controlled demolition. He is now a bridal parody and you expect him to howl about it, to try and wiggle out of your grip, maybe sink his pointy troll teeth into your shoulder, but he does none of those things. What he does is loosen, going soft and malleable against your chest. It’s such a small gesture, but the implications shock you so bad you almost drop him. 

You can keep your Dave Strider cool in all states of undress, to all points of arousal. He’s been twisted so far up your ass that there is no space left between your bodies but then he turns his stupid soggy head into your sternum and knocks his glasses off-kilter and doesn’t give enough shits about it to fix them and suddenly you’re glowing red all the way down to your neck. 

What does it mean that he doesn’t make things difficult? 

That has always been a cornerstone of your relationship, being annoying little shits to each other, gesturing rudely, saying stupid shit that you don’t mean because it’s hilarious. You pick on each other because you care. Sollux snarls at you in the morning unless you feed him coffee. He grins wickedly as he separates you from your clothes. When he’s busy and you come looking to pester him, he tends to throw snack foods and shout at you in Alternian because the English language isn’t metaphysically strong enough to support the weight of all that fury. But, you realize, he has never told you to go away. After the wickedness is done, when you’re gooey and sated and swimming in blissful hormones, he is never the first to get up. That’s always you. He stays where he lands like he’s afraid to move and you always thought it was the moment he was trying so hard not to disturb. But, you realize, what if it was you? 

You don’t think you’ve ever just grabbed him and held on for no reason. 

If you touched him more, would he look so content right now, his foot slashed to ribbons, in obvious pain, but held? You feel faintly ill.

“Pay attention to your foot, dipshit.” You jostle him a little to get his attention. You’re trying to open the passenger door, but you can’t swing around without knocking his bad leg into the side of the car. His head emerges sluggishly like a bird coming out from under its wing and he just reaches over and gets it for you. Getting him into the seat takes some tactical maneuvering. Eventually you just grab his ankle to hold it steady and dump the rest of him in there like a sack of dog food. You grin triumphantly at his affronted scowl. 

Is it possible that you don’t touch him enough?

If you were a tenderer boyfriend, what else would you add to this moment? First impulse says you’re done here, so just close the door and drive to the ER. Show him you care by getting his shit put back together, by solving problems. What else is left? You could kiss him on the forehead or something, but that might give him an outright heart attack and you run the risk of puking all over him because of how soppy that is. You take him in. His face is damp, his hair is a mess, his glasses are still wonky.

You hesitate for so long that you can see him getting ready to ask you what your fucking problem is. You know probably look like a moron just standing there staring, so you ultimately fall back on old tactics. What needs to be done? You reach out and pull his glasses off his face, relocate a strand of hair that’s close to poking him in the eye, and set the glasses back on his nose. It’s stranger and more intimate than any sexual act you have ever performed.

Sollux’s eyes are so large that you can see them over the rim of his glasses. You don’t know what else to do, so you take an awkward step back and close the door. You try to be casual about it, but you walk away feeling like you just slammed it in his face. Oh god, you’ve been fucking this whole thing up and you haven’t even noticed. You were raised on Bro’s unique brand of affection, learning to decode his love from the little gestures he made, but Sollux wasn’t raised that way. To him, you wouldn’t seem all that different and he’s starving. 

You realize that your hands are shaking, so you stop behind the car and bend over to allow yourself two seconds of full-blown, hands-on-knees, blinding panic. Hyperventilation. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Okay, nothing just happened. You move on.


	2. Chapter 2

Several months ago, your brother went on a spontaneous cross-country road trip with his long-term boyfriend and his blog, posing smuppets against a varied backdrop of cheap, all-American roadside attractions. Bro found one of those classic pine tree air fresheners at a Chevron in Ohio and knew you couldn’t live without it, so he taped the thing to a strategically random postcard of Toledo and dropped it in a mailbox the next day. Now it dangles cheerfully from your rearview mirror, wafting artificial mountain breezes through the cabin of your car. When you go over bumps, you are transported to someone else’s winter nightmare.

Sollux likes to bitch about it every time he climbs into the passenger seat. This has become so traditional and expected that you are almost disappointed when he forgets. 

“Put your foot up on the dash,” you tell him. “The fucked up one.”

“Why?”

You wave your hand vaguely. “I think that’s what you’re supposed to do. It’s because of blood flow or shock or something. Medical reasons.” You aren’t a paramedic. You figure you know enough about first aid to keep a person sort of alive until the real medics got there, but that’s where your abilities begin and end. Despite John’s insistence to the contrary, you have never sewn yourself up with dental floss. That was Bro.

“I’ll bleed on your car,” he counters. That’s true. Sollux’s blood has been pooling in the grooves of your cheap, plastic floor mats, mixing with the grime and the weird, tiny leaves from that plant by your apartment building. You notice that he hasn’t looked down there yet. Sollux isn’t squeamish in general, but you can understand his reluctance. You probably wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to see the glass jutting out of your foot either.

“There’s a towel in the glovebox.”

In your periphery, you can see Sollux’s head turn your way. There might be some amusement in the set of his eyebrows, but you can’t be sure unless you look right at him. You look right at him. Yes, he’s amused. 

“Ith it … the _emergenthy_ towel?”

“The very one,” you say, waving at the glovebox to hurry him up. If he goes into shock because you were indulging his playful mockery, you will not be in a good mood. When you bought your first car, Bro made you an emergency malfunction kit in a completely legitimate attempt at concerned parenthood (or something). It’s just that he literally put everything in there from jumper cables to a full-size machete and a handful of MREs. Someday, you have no doubt that Bro will be leading a gang of ragtag survivalists through the zombie apocalypse.

The towel was, you think, intended for overheated engine parts, but you aren’t sure. You are equally as unsure about why you would go anywhere near an overheated engine anyway since you’re more likely to brain yourself on a pressurized coolant lid than to fix the original problem. The towel, therefore, has been repurposed as a giant washable napkin. Occasionally it smells like the inside of a McDonalds. Right now it smells like Tide and french fries. Sollux barely wrinkles his nose about it as he balls the towel up and presses it lightly between his heel and the dashboard, but he does make pain faces. You lift the Bacardi from your drink holder and pass it over.

“Dave!”

“Sollux?”

“Why ith there alcohol?!”

“Hmm.” You pause to consider the question. “Long ago, person or persons unknown happened to notice that sugary plant matter ferments in the presence of yeast. Then, of course, someone thought it would be a good idea to try drinking—”

“Dave, theriously, we could get arrethted for thith.”

“Just put the cap back on between swallows.” You shrug. You don’t know the exact odds of being pulled over in the midst of transporting someone to the hospital with a sort of open bottle of alcohol in the car, but you figure they’re probably slim. “Is it even an open bottle if the top is on?” You don’t think so.

“If the theal is off, probably! Otherwithe what keepth you from thcrewing the cap back on when the copth pull you over?”

“What if I wanted to go make piña coladas at John’s using alcohol that we used to make piña coladas at my house a week earlier? If I had to buy a new, sealed bottle of rum every time I wanted to make piña coladas with John, my entire paycheck would go to rum.”

“Why doethn’t John have rum?”

“Drink the booze, you paranoiac.”

Sollux unscrews the cap and swallows several times, too busy sourpussing at you to sourpuss about the flavor. You need to think of some more ways to piss him off. When he’s pissed off he looks less like he’s exsanguinating on your floorboard.

“In the highly unlikely event that we get pulled over, I could just Vanna White at your foot a little bit and go, see here, officer sir, the alcohol is being used as an oral analgesic for legitimate first aid reasons, and he’ll be like oh shit let me escort you to the hospital.”

“I don’t think that’th how that workth,” Sollux grumbles. His head flops backwards onto the shoulder of the seat and you almost swerve out of your lane because you think for a brief, horrifying instant that he’s passed out. Then he takes another swig off the bottle and you want to sock him in the side of the head for alarming you. “Can we be completely theriouth for a thecond, though?”

“Okay, hit me with the gravity.”

“I don’t need to go to the hothpital.”

“Vetoed.”

“We can pull the glath out with tweetherth and pour some of thith rum on it and everything will be fine because I’m thturdy.” He’s folded bonelessly around your seat, looking about as sturdy as a wet sponge. You let him know this with a long, slow sweep of the eye and one eyebrow lifted in an unimpressed arc.

“I’m jutht tired! Of your bullthit!” he adds triumphantly.

“What if we go home and the bleeding doesn’t stop?”

“It hathn’t thtopped bleeding becauthe of the glath.” Sollux takes his glasses off and tries to dry the lenses with his shirttail, but the fabric is too wet and he just ends up pushing water around. “When we pull it out, I’ll be fine.”

“But what if you aren’t? What if you nicked an artery?” It feels strange to you being the firm-toned voice of reason instead of that one guy whose good ideas are securely packaged in layers of irony and odd humor.

Sollux scoffs. “There aren’t any arterieth in your foot.”

You spend the next couple of minutes discussing the possible existence of foot arteries. It occurs to you that you and Sollux both have internet browsers on your phones, but you’re busy working on another search between red lights. “Gangrene,” you say. It’s your trump card. You drop it on the table now, your victory all but assured.

_“What?”_

“Gangrene.” You toss your phone into his lap and give him a minute to contemplate the wall of tiny, disgusting thumbnails that your image search provided you. “This shit actually turns green, Sollux. Green and then black. As you die, pieces of you crumble off like fancy French cheese. And it smells, too. Pretty much the only thing they can do about it is cut off the rotten parts.”

“Is gangrene native to the United States?”

“Have you read that Hemmingway thing with the mountain and the ganky leg? Well, you should treat that story like a manual about why you should get medical treatment for things. Pull up the next tab.” You wait for him to comply. A new wall of preloaded images pops up on the screen. “Now, let me tell you about antibiotic resistant staph infection.”

By the time you finish commentating on staph and the three tabs behind it, you are pulling into the hospital parking lot and Sollux has been rendered more or less cooperative.

He refuses to go anywhere bridal style. If he must be carried, he says, he wants to be carried right side up, so he clings to your back like a baby opossum. Before you lock your car, you go to the back seat and bend at the knees so Sollux can reach in and grab the car mat. The ones in the back are smaller and he’s horrified at the prospect of bleeding on someone else’s floor. 

There is normally a sort of sacrificial nobility in the imagery of a man transporting his fallen comrade on his back. Rose would say that it’s “archetypically embedded in the Western collective subconscious.” But when you enter the waiting room, there’s a car mat flopping against your chest and there is no archetype for what you look like. The middle aged receptionist doesn’t even blink when she sees it. Her eyes skim straight down your combined bodies and hover briefly on Sollux’s gashed up foot, which is now dribbling quietly on your pant leg. “You can come back in a minute for the paperwork,” is all she has to say.

The waiting room is mostly empty, so it isn’t hard to find a place to sit. Still, it’s strange to you, this waiting. You expected to find more urgency here, but it’s more or less an ordinary doctor’s office. There’s a young kid in a green and white jersey in one corner who cradles an arm and looks to be a hairsbreadth away from an emotional meltdown. He is bracketed on either side by concerned parents who talk to him in undertones. You can’t hear the words, but the tone is gentle. Two ladies—one of them visibly unwell—occupy a pair of seats farther down that same row. They don’t even look at you, completely absorbed in their own personal horror. An elderly couple and a younger woman huddle together at the center of the room. Then there’s the guy on the far end sitting by himself. Nothing is visibly wrong with him, but he looks guilty. 

What do they do if you walk in and just conk out in the middle of the floor?

A couple of you new waiting buddies are interested in you and Sollux. Most of them eye you with blank, unreadable faces, but the elderly couple is deeply concerned. The woman leans into the man and whispers something that makes their younger companion look down and away from you. You choose a seat behind them and focus on getting Sollux to the ground without sustaining car mat related head trauma. The corner of the mat barely misses your ear, but otherwise nothing exciting happens.

“Thorry,” Sollux mutters faintly.

“Woah there, you good?”

Sollux looks badly washed out. You’ve never seen him truly “pale” before on account of his gray skin, but it turns out there is supposed to be a faint yellow cast underneath the gray. Huh. You never noticed that before, but it’s obvious now that it’s gone. He’s positively ghostly without it. Grimacing, he lowers his chin, clutching the rubber mat like he’s forgotten he still has it. 

You kneel in front of him so you can see his face, but that doesn’t do much good. It’s all in shadow. “Sollux, talk to me, dude. What’s the problem? Did your foot hit something?”

The troll shakes his head, getting his fingers into his hair and tangling them, pulling. You pull the mat out of his lap and set it on the floor, carefully moving his heel over onto the rubber. It’s something to do, a way to be useful. You aren’t sure how else to be. Sollux is bent forward, his head hidden behind his arms. You look at how tightly his fists are clenched and wonder if he’s going to pull his hair out.

“What then?” You shouldn’t get irritated with him. His foot is all fucked up. Don’t get irritated. He’s learned how to read it in your voice, in the way it slows and flattens. The difference is slight and most people don’t catch it, but Sollux has seen more of you.

“It’th nothing. I’m being thtupid,” he mutters. “I jutht thaw it acthidentally.”

“That’s it? You just saw it?” Shit, that’s not exactly what you intended to say, not how you intended it to sound. What you meant to ask was something like, _So there’s nothing physical I should worry about?_ but now he probably thinks that you think he’s being ridiculous. You bite down on the inside of your cheek, but you have to work with that somehow because you’re committed now. Striders don’t fumble over words.

For once, Sollux doesn’t have any sass. He sits there quietly and you have no idea what he’s thinking. Should you know him better than this?

“Sollux.” You glance over at the parents with their son and try to make your voice do what theirs are doing instead of what yours is doing, which messing everything up. They make soothing look so simple, like it’s a natural human gift that comes with the operating system. Meanwhile, your inner caretaker lies comatose at the bottom of an oubliette. “You’re psyching yourself, dude. Stuff like this hurts more when you look at it. Just breathe.” Wow, you almost can’t handle how moronic you sound. You have no choice but to get up and physically walk away from yourself.

Maybe you should touch him before you go. You eye his shoulder like a chessboard for a long time before you decide to forfeit your turn. How does tenderness work anyway? When you go to retrieve the forms you need, you feel ugly and defeated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The draft for this chapter was much longer, but I'm editing at a snail's pace so I divided it. Chapter three is complete, but unpolished. There may be minor procedural inaccuracies because I've never been to an emergency room. I enjoy critique, though. I'm trying to improve as a writer, so constructive criticism is legitimately one of my favorite things.

**Author's Note:**

> I cut it off here because I'm getting busy again and I didn't want to leave Anon hanging for too much longer! I don't expect this to be a monster project, but I'm writing in between school obligations, so I thought it would be better to break things up into smaller sections. =D


End file.
